Intake Forms For Your Counseling Practice

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How would you like to save time and money preparing your Client Intake Packets?

Another time and money hog in running a private practice is dealing with paperwork. An intake packet may easily have 15-20 pages. Preparing a professional packet and having it ready for a new client is added time, money, and sometimes aggravation — such as when you’ve run out of your last form or you’ve made one too many copies of a copy and the form no longer looks professional. Not to mention the cost of operating your own copy machine or printer.

Placing your intake forms online is a great streamlining tip and benefits both you and your client. In order to do this you will need your own electronic set of professional intake forms. To accomplish placing your intake forms online all you need is some minor technological know-how. Here’s how to do it:

Create a page on your website or WordPress blog to house your links.

Create PDF documents of the intake forms and save in a “support-files” or some kind of an extra folder on your computer which you will then upload to your website or blog.

Create a hyperlink on the web/blog page to the PDF documents stored online in that folder. Handling media files of this type is very easy in WordPress.

Alternatively, if you have limited technical capabilities and money:

Upload your intake forms in PDF format to your Google documents

Then Share the forms with your clients by email.

Hope this money and time saving tip helps…see ya next time!

If you want more money and time saving tips for your private practice click here.

First, the Phone Intake – this is where it begins. A 1 page form that guides you or your secretary through the phone intake interview. TAKE note of the Referred By prompt and make sure you send a thank you note to the person who made the referral.

Second, Personal Information and Insurance – collects all the important information to bill insurance if your client is using behavioral health benefits. The kit comes with 2 forms: one that assigns benefits to the therapist and another that assigns benefits to the client.

Third, Biopsychosocial, 5 page comprehensive biopsychosocial – this is the most important part of the intake. This form has a holistic bent to it – it covers everything from symptoms, to mental health history, nutrition, to spiritual history as well as abuse, developmental history and much more. This form will lead the way to completing a comprehensive assessment that will help begin to unfold the client’s underlying issues so together with your client you can develop a treatment plan that will result in client success.

Fourth, Intake Assessment, this is where you summarize your clinically important findings from the biopsychosocial and intake interview. This is also the form you use to document the mental status exam, clinical and diagnostic impressions.

Fifth, Information and Consent, you should not do therapy without a signed informed consent. This form covers all the general basis you need to inform your client of before beginning therapy. When I put together my own personal intake forms I consulted with an attorney. You may want to do the same especially regarding your Information and Consent form. But the nice thing about this form is, if you are using Microsoft word you can easily tweak it to add or delete words or segments to make it fit your own counseling philosophy.

Finally, the Release of Information, when in the best interest of your client, use this form to get your client’s permission to speak with others about your client’s treatment

Robust forms like these will assist you in conducting a thorough and effective intake that will get counseling started on the right foot.

The first line item on page 1 is “Client’s stated purpose for counseling.” Here you will briefly state the reason the client gave you when you asked the question, “What brought you here today?”

There are 11 specific areas of clinical concern plus space for writing in “other”.
Page 1 is the place where you can summarize your findings from the biospychosocial (Which incidentally is a comprehensive 5 page tool that dovetails seamlessly with this Intake Assessment Form… both are included in the Intake Forms Tool Kit)

Page 1 is like a snapshot of all the areas of clinical concern. This is the kind of concise information you will need about your client to begin making an accurate diagnosis and creating an appropriate treatment plan.

Take Away Tip: The intake assessment consists of 2 broad sets of data:

Page one which focuses mainly on the historical information reported to you by the client.

Page 2 has to do with your professional clinical impressions based on the client history and your professional analysis and observation.

This is where the therapist writes out their own statement about how the client presented. Include those things that are of clinical concern and relate direct to client’s presenting problem and reason for counseling.

Take away tip: Always do your best to write in measurable and observable terms, avoiding stereotypes and opinionated statements. Keep it concise and to the point. You are creating a professional picture/snapshot of how the client appeared upon intake.

Diagnostic Impressions

This Intake form assumes you will be using the DSM V diagnostic criteria, plus it includes a space to record defense mechanisms.

Not all therapists make note of defense mechanisms but I have found it helpful for myself and the client to identify those, since they can play such an important role in the client’s recovery.

Here’s a couple questions to consider: “How will the diagnosis help the client” to reach their goals. Is assigning a diagnosis in the best interest of the client.

The Intake Forms Tool Kit contains an alternative Intake Form which does not use the DSM diagnostic criteria.

On the “non DSM” form it simply asks for you to identify the “primary problem” and also note whether there are substance issues, health issues and psychosocial stressors. As well as a prompt for identifying primary defense mechanisms.

Take Away Tip: Helping the client to identify and utilize healthy defense mechanisms can have a very significant and positive impact on therapeutic outcome.

In Summary, the intake form has 2 main categories of information:
1. The client history
2. The therapist’s clinical observations and impressions

A robust form like this one will assist the counselor in conducting a thorough and effective intake that will help identify the primary areas of concern and begin to formulate the treatment plan goals and objectives.

For more information on downloading this intake form assessment as well as other tools and forms to make your job easier go tohttp://IntakeForms.net/ or click the link in the description below this video.